We have a bunch of world language professors prying at the edges of Pressbooks. One of the requests yesterday was to be able to create a mini-dictionary of target language words at the beginning of sections written in that target language. Mousing over the words would show their English equivalent. The intent is to have ready assistance for those who need it so that writing in the target language can happen earlier in the course. ACF came to mind pretty quickly for this case. I really just needed the ability to generate two values that are paired together- the target language word and the English definition. I need to be able to make as many of these pairs as the person wants to put in there. That’s custom made for the ACF repeater field. Now that I had an easy way for people to add the words, I just needed a way to do the tooltip display. There are 12,000 ways to do this but I just looked around for one that bragged on its accessibility. I found this example on codepen and went with it. This bit of php builds that content. Now that we have the the content and way to handle the tooltip piece, I needed to stick it at the top of the posts. That’s just […]

I have been doing little other than semi-real web development for three weeks across a number of projects. It’s a level of sustained practice/work that I’ve probably never done before. Who knew that kind of focus could actually result in fairly dramatic improvement? One of the projects is the reconstruction of our ALT Lab department page and I have had the chance to really do some stuff that I’ve been considering for several years. There’s a lot going on in the site but I’ll focus on one little concept/workflow for the moment. We have two goals in this case. We want a browsable catalog of workshops we offer that can be shared with people so they can request them.1 We need a calendar of events. Those events will include workshops that are presented at a particular date. We use Events Calendar Pro for this and are very happy with it. Workshops – The Post Type Step one was to create a custom post type called ‘workshop’ and then assign some custom fields to it with ACF. That keeps the content fairly consistent in look/feel and gives us enough standardization to do other tricks. We ended up with a custom post interface that looks like the gif2 below. You can see the ability to add learning objectives, examples, audience etc. in […]

If you use Advanced Custom Fields you may not realize it removes the ‘Custom Fields’ option from your Screen Options view and hides them entirely in the space they normally occupy below your posts/pages. That’s nice occasionally and a pain other times. Today it was a pain. I figured this out one time before but it took me a while to re-find it at this github page so I’m leaving it here in case I forget again.

flickr photo shared by Internet Archive Book Images with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) I’ve been doing a whole lot of WordPress customization lately for really widely varying purposes/people. It has been a lot of fun and it’s an option that I’m not sure has been conveyed well to our faculty. Many times, faculty are looking for a process for students (or one another) that is semi-structured. The students have options but they need help remembering to do certain things (include at least one image, consider these three topics, add a link, etc.) or they need a bit of guidance to help create uniformity of some sort. If you’ve ever asked more than ten people to answer three questions in an email then you know that virtually all the humans fail to follow directions when given the chance.1 You’ll also see the width and depth of human imagination if you ask someone to fill in a text field answering a question you really thought was straight forward.2 There are also concerns about the complexity of WordPress that we can address through custom post types and custom user roles while still allowing for a good deal of flexibility within our established constraints. This interplay of custom fields, custom post types, and usually a custom theme to display the former is probably […]